Standardized Audio and Voice Interviewing (SAVI): Digital Innovations in Survey Data Collection and Analysis

The aim of this project is to develop methods that enable the fusion of survey data and text analytics to enrich population data available for social scientists. For this purpose, the project investigates the technological feasibility and methodological properties of Standardized Audio and Voice Interviewing (SAVI), i.e. the automated question-reading and answer-recording, transcription, coding, and analysis of open answer formats in mobile web surveys. The recent technological advancements for surveys on mobile devices offer new data collection opportunities, which so far have remained hardly explored. One such field of opportunities is expanding standardized interviewing from questions with closed answer formats of rigid scales and predefined answer options to SAVI for questions with open answer formats. The use and informative value of open answer formats previously depended on the writing and keying motivations of the respondents and the time and financial resources of the researchers. This project investigates whether current developments in computer science and data science allow for automated production of high-quality data through SAVI in mobile web surveys.